The Canton Memorial Civic Center is a multi-purpose arena in Canton, Ohio, USA. It was built in 1951. It was the home to the Canton Legends arena football team and Canton Invaders indoor soccer team and Ohio Aviators of the American Basketball Association. The Canton Memorial Civic Center is owned by the City of Canton and can hold up to 5,200 guests in the arena, and up to 600 guests in the McKinley Room.
It is large enough that it hosts several concerts (music, children and comedy) each year, and yet intimate enough that it host many private and community events such as several of the annual Pro Football Hall of Fame festival events.
In the 1980s and 1990s, it hosted many professional wrestling shows promoted by the National Wrestling Alliance and the World Wrestling Federation, including several broadcast episodes of WCW's Monday Nitro and the WWF's Monday Night Raw. On March 24, 2007, it held a "Road to WrestleMania 23" house show for World Wrestling Entertainment. It also held a SmackDown! house show, on January 5, 2008 and an ECW/Smackdown house show on August 31st, 2009.
On October 27, 2008, Barack Obama held a Closing Address Rally to a crowd of over 4,000.
The arena is now the home of the Canton Cougars of the Ultimate Indoor Football League. In fall 2011, it became home to the Canton Charge of the NBA Development League.
Famous quotes containing the words civic center, memorial, civic and/or center:
“But look what we have built ... low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.... Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums.... Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)
“I hope there will be no effort to put up a shaft or any monument of that sort in memory of me or of the other women who have given themselves to our work. The best kind of a memorial would be a school where girls could be taught everything useful that would help them to earn an honorable livelihood; where they could learn to do anything they were capable of, just as boys can. I would like to have lived to see such a school as that in every great city of the United States.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“But look what we have built ... low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.... Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums.... Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)
“Louise Bryant: I’m sorry if you don’t believe in mutual independence and free love and respect.
Eugene O’Neill: Don’t give me a lot of parlor socialism that you learned in the village. If you were mine, I wouldn’t share you with anybody or anything. It would be just you and me. You’d be at the center of it all. You know it would feel a lot more like love than being left alone with your work.”
—Warren Beatty (b. 1937)